CHAPTER 25

“It’s strange,” Katha says. “Not knowing where you come from.”

We’re sitting by the fireplace after Medrein and Dala have retired for the night and long before Rev arrives from whatever escapade she had planned for tonight. Katha’s eyes are lit yellow by the glowing coals, her hair afire. She looks like someone from another age, a goddess of the hearth.

“You know where you come from,” I say, though I know what she means. Hearing Katha speak of life beyond Reach, even a life before this one, scares me in a way I can’t define. “You came from the hill doors. Like a faerie.”

She smiles. The logs crackle merrily and the house is sunk in sleep. Though the wind moans and whimpers outside, inside there’s nothing but warm peace.

“It’s hard to explain.”

“To a mere human born in a house, you mean?”

“To someone who wasn’t found in a cave and adopted. Who’s always known who his parents were.”

“Unfortunately,” I say, stretching on the rug. From the corner of my eyes I can see the mysterious little smile crest the sides of her mouth and be again subdued by her thoughtful mood. When she’s like that, I feel nothing more than a child being gently lectured about maturity.

“They’re not as bad as you think, Mal,” Katha says. She lies down behind me, so that the crowns of our heads are almost touching and we’re staring up at the same spot on the ceiling. “Especially Dala.”

“Mother’s all right,” I admit, shifting my weight on the suddenly uncomfortable rug. “She’s a bit… Well… you know, she’s very…”

Silence.

“You’re supposed to interrupt me around now so I don’t have to keep floundering,” I say.

“Oops,” Katha whispers. “Missed my cue.”

We giggle. It’s good to be lying here, letting sleep bait us with sudden and unexpected waking dreams. The shadows on the ceiling look just like trees shifting. In Dala’s stories, in the great forests to the South where trees grow tall as mountains a man can meet true giants and perils beyond count…

“…him,” Katha is sayin. “Medrein. He’s tough, yes, and he’s always very sure of what needs to happen and what everyone needs to do. But I don’t understand why you don’t like him.”

There’s a quick pressure in my chest, like I’m the egg and my heart is the chick pecking at the inside.

“We just don’t get along,” I manage. Why is it always so difficult to talk about my parents? “Anyway, why all the questions? I’m good, they’re good, you don’t need to worry, Kath. You’re just doing it to annoy me.”

“Like I said,” she mutters, sounding like she’s about to fall asleep. “It’s strange not knowing where you come from.”

I don’t answer. Is it strange? The notion carries different ideas through my mind, painting them against the backdrop of my closed eyes. Not knowing where you’re from. Not knowing Dala and Medrein are your parents. Being free to be anyone anywhere, to the let road take you where it wants and live any way you choose. But always that darkness in the back of your mind, the pull and tug of a past you can’t remember. I open my mouth to say I understand what she means.

“Except you’re right,” Katha says suddenly. She’s more awake than I thought. More awake than I am, in fact, as I can barely keep myself alert to her words, and so they drift over me, insubstantial as smoke, never penetrating deeper than the surface. “I’m from the hill doors…”

*

I awake to violent coughing and pain, and it takes me a moment to realize both are coming from me and one is causing the other. A waterskin is pressed against my mouth and I drink deep, washing what feels like gravel in my throat. The skin is removed before I even get to taste the water properly and my head reset against a soft surface.

A dull throb pulses through my entire body. With the memories pouring into me, I’m sure that if I checked I would find a dozen fractured bones and more cuts and scrapes that a real surgeon would know what to do with. I don’t want to check. I don’t want to twitch or move, because maybe then I can be at peace until the inevitable end.

There are sounds all around me. Distant echoes of crashing wood, occasional shouts. Closer, the stronger assault is on my nose. It smells like forest and meadow, like riverside mud and charcoal, like a thousand spring flowers pressed between the pages of a book. It smells like Dala.

It’s that thought that makes me crack my eyes open a little. I’m not in a corridor, that’s for sure. There is no furniture and no flashing lights. Whatever light there is, it’s coming from below, and the ceiling here is very, very close.

Too close.

I raise myself up on my elbows and the world immediately swells and dips around me. Feverish pain shoots up from my hand and makes me woozy, so I fall again onto my back. Whatever I’m lying on, it’s very straight and narrow, and it wobbles when I move.

“Trying to push us off, are you?” says a voice.

I freeze. Slowly, I twist my head to look at the speaker.

It’s girl with her head a buzz of very short red hair. Her face is dappled with freckles and her eyes are focused on me like a fox’s observing a bird fallen off its nest. Her ears are pointy instead of rounded, but not overlong as you’d see in an elf. I try to sit, but the ceiling is too low to permit that, and only when I move do I notice that the wooden board I’m lying on is quite a ways up from the floor. I freeze.

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“Yeah, good on you for spotting that,” the girl says.

“How did I…”

“Get here? I carried you, of course,” she says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. I turn again to look at her. Whatever age she is, she’s short for it and couldn’t weigh as much as a sack of potatoes with a brick in each pocket. I tell her so.

She snorts. “Like you’re any sort of lumberjack. But no,” she admits. “I had help.” She feels inside a breastpocket and I notice her hands are clad in very thin gloves. She pulls out a couple of dice and shows them to me. They’re somewhat familiar, though I can’t…

“Those are mine,” I say weakly. I’d found them in the bolt room and promptly forgot about them.

“Were yours,” she corrects me. “And seeing as you’re in that state and they were completely unused, I have the feeling you wouldn’t mind me taking them. Not that you could do anything about it, that is. Your friend even suggested I take them as payment for a daring rescue.”

“My friend?”

“Hello, Malco,” Rue says, and I feel the buzz all over my stomach.

I close my eyes, trying to adapt to my new reality. My body feels like it was pummeled by an angry bear, both because of the actual pummeling and the igneous ill coursing through my veins. Fever for sure. One question keeps nagging at me.

“What do the dice do?”

She grins an easy, mischievous smile.

“Don’t raise a fuss about me keeping them and I’ll tell you.”

My eyes focus on the girl for a moment. The fever is making me slow. It takes a while, but eventually it dawns on me.

“You’re the kid the cyclops was chasing,” I say. “I saved your butt!”

Her smile drops.

“That was you?” she moans. “Gods damnit, I thought I had a good thing going here with you owing me a favor.”

Reluctantly, she extends the dice. I look down at her palm and notice that one of the surfaces is completely white. I can’t believe I forgot I had those, but at the same time it never occurred to me they could be valuable.

“Know what?” I say, thinking of the state of my hands and the process of picking up something that small. “Keep them.”

“Brilliant,” she says, snagging them immediately. “Knew you’d say that.”

I chuckle at her self-assuredness and a swirl of nausea makes my head hurt.

“Where are we?” I ask.

“Look down and see.”

I groan but do as she says by turning on my side, letting Rue plop onto the wooden shelf. At first, I have to blink to adjust to the environment. This room isn’t as large as the library, tall and long, but very narrow. Its walls are covered in shelves, and the shelves… the shelves are packed full of herbs, mosses, barks, roots, and a profusion of vials, glasses, jars, and strange twisty vases.

“The laboratory,” I whisper.

“Does kinda look like it, doesn’t it?” says my savior. “And that’s not all. Look there,” she points.

I follow her finger to the far end of the room. The ground is half-hidden in darkness, but there are two obvious ways in and out of the room. One is an open passage, doorless, closer to us. The other is a supremely ornamented pure white door. Standing next to it on a thin leg is a dark pedestal, and streaming up from it…

“What is that?”

“Search me,” the girl says. “Dark light, far as I can tell. I passed my hand over it and nothing much happened.”

“It’s like…”

“The door on the second floor,” she finishes.

I nod. At one point, we must have been on opposite sides of that door. I remember opening it much too late, finding those mutilated bodies, and then running down the hallway to find…

“What’s your name?”

“Wyl,” she says.

“I’m Malco.”

“Pleasure’s all yours, I’m sure, for as long as it will last.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, buddy, that I don’t think you’re here for the long stay,” Wyl says, nodding to my brutalized body. “Those were some hard knocks you took. I helped you because I’m such a stand-up gal, but I hope you won’t mark it against me if I leave soon-ish. I plan on getting out of this place alive. So if you were to tell me what you know, we could make this as unpleasant as possible.”

“What I know?” I ask feebly.

Wyl turns her sharp eyes to Rue.

“Your friend there told me it would be in my best interest to rescue you cuz you know how to get out of this place. Is that true?”

“I think so.”

“And?”

“I need help,” I say. “We’re in the laboratory. I can use the herbs to heal myself, these are mostly cuts and fractured bones…”

“Right. All the luck to you.”

“You’re not gonna help me?”

“Feels like I’m having one pulled over me, Malco,” Wyl says. “And I don’t like how that feels. I should have guessed a way out was too much to hope for, but I’m happy with the loot I got.” She tosses the dice in the air. “Be seeing you.” Wyl pushes herself off the shelf and lands her feet on the one below, her face level with mine.

“No, please. I mean I could do it, but my hands… I… I need help.”

“I’m sorry, Malco, but I’m not running a charity here. Bye.”

She vanishes.

“I gave you those dice.”

Silence.

“It’s got to do with these doors!” I yell, desperation staining my tone.

Wyl pops up again, big smile plastered on her face.

“That’s a start.”

“I’ll tell you more. I have no reason to hide this from you, I just need the herbs.”

“What will you be needing, chief?”

Yes.

“Saint Toma—” I catch the look on her face just in time to correct myself. “A dry, orangish herb. Mix it with water until it forms a paste,” I turn onto my shoulder again so I can look down into the room. “And… there, that spiky one with the silver lining. That one I can just chew on. And that’s it. After that I’ll be able to help myself.”

“Comin’ right up,” Wyl says. And then she falls.

I shout out, but she only laughs as she catches herself on the shelf below, jumps back, and grabs onto the ladder on the opposite side of the room. From there she peruses the options before selecting a broad leaf with a silvery sheen to its border. Then she returns, climbing up to the topmost shelf, jumping down to my side of the room and then scurrying up until she’s facing me again. It’s the most graceful I’ve ever seen someone move.

“Silver,” she says extending it. “I’ll have to go look for the other one. Sit tight.”

And off she goes again.

With difficulty, I place the leaf in my mouth and force myself to chew despite the bitter taste. They have Vadirleaf. I can barely believe it. I remember when Dala was finally able to secure a specimen and how that turned into one of her bigger failures as a healer. She fussed over it all Winter only for it to dwindle and die in Spring.

And I find it here, enough of it to grow a cow back from a hoof. Poor mother.

This one will help with my any small fractures I have, maybe even the broken bones in my hand. In a few minutes, as soon as it’s done its work, I’ll be able to assess the rest of my body.

I’ve never had occasion to chew on this leaf before. It’s supposed to be unpleasant, but so far—

Sharp pain spreads through my body. I grit my teeth to stop myself from screaming, but the agony is too much, all over my body, and I can help a long, thin moan escape my lips. As it heals the smaller fractures, the leaf also works on the muscles, forcing them to straighten out the bones. What it does not do is be gentle about it. It snaps things into place with all the care of a carpenter hammering down nails. I feel the tremors in my body as muscles contract grotesquely.

“Nice lady,” Rue buzzes. I think he’s trying to distract me from the pain. “She knew how the dice worked. You know, Malco, if you had spent a little more time trying them out, I’m sure you would have gotten the hang of them.”

I don’t find the strength to answer. The contractions stop in starts, drawing a few more whimpers from me. I dig into the wood with my nails and bite my tongue when the last spasm courses through me and then wait, eyes closed, dreading another one.

“Hope all that moaning isn’t you doing anything funny,” Wyl says cheerfully from somewhere below me.

“Oh, shut it.”